With God by their side

Julia Gillard has dramatically increased funding for school chaplains but not everybody's happy, writes Damien Murphy.

October 30, 2010 — 3.00am

THE flagpoles of Australia's schoolgrounds are John Howard's main education legacy, according to the former Hawke government minister John Brown.

With Howard's political autobiography doing standing-room-only publicity, judgments about the former prime minister lie thick on the ground. But Brown's opinion ignores the continuing success of Howard's greatest gesture to education, the National School Chaplaincy Program.

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The idea came out of Howard's hunt for the Christian vote during his last term of office. It has continued apace ever since.

Recently the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, ''turbo-charged'' the chaplaincy program and prompted an unseemly rush to chaplaincy, even in the NSW government school system, which has historically eschewed mixing church and state.

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One of Gillard's key election campaign promises in August was to boost school chaplain numbers. Her $222 million pledge - more than double Howard's spend - is expected to result in federally funded chaplains at more than one-third of Australia's 10,000 government and non-government schools.

Constitutional concerns about the separation of church and state or fears that too many newly and under-trained chaplains are being press-ganged into action without adequate qualifications or experience to deal with troubled teenagers have been swept aside in the subsidy scramble.

In a multicultural, pluralistic Australia, the money is available to all faiths wishing to support the wellbeing, values and spirituality of young people, with the proviso their chaplains do not ram religion down students' throats.

A handful of Jewish, Muslim and other schools got with the program but it is overwhelmingly a Christian jamboree, and a phenomenon of government school systems.

While some 500 or so independent and Catholic schools have signed on, the Catholic system has overwhelmingly opted out, leaving the field open to the International Scripture Union and its affiliated organisations across Australia, including GenR8 Ministries in NSW.

The Scripture Union juggernaut fields chaplains in 85 per cent of the participating government schools across Australia. Operating under the umbrella of the National School Chaplaincy Association, it stands to reap up to $50 million from ''administration costs'' deducted from the subsidy over the three administrations of Howard, Kevin Rudd and Gillard.

The association is keeping mum about how much it skims off the chaplaincy subsidies. Asked about how much National School Chaplaincy Association would benefit from taxpayer support for the program, convenor Stanley Jeyaraj says: ''Financial arrangements including administration costs between all school chaplaincy providers in private and public schools are matters which are arranged between various organisations and DEEWR (the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations).''

Bob Montgomery, a past president of the Australian Psychological Society, says there are concerns about the qualifications and abilities of chaplains to deal with troubled teenagers.

Montgomery ran a program for sex offenders in the Oregon prison system in which all the men involved had manifested signs during their teenage years, and he doubts chaplains are equipped to deal with such early signs.

''What can a newly qualified 'chappy', as the Scripture Union calls its graduates, say or do? Maybe 'God will guide you', but that is not enough. It is to be regretted that Australian governments have chosen to fund such well-intentioned amateurism when qualified professionals are sorely needed.''

The NSCA countered, saying chaplains are not in competition with mental health professionals.

Others claim proselytising is inevitable. One father in Toowoomba, Ron Williams, says his children have been subjected to religious zealotry. He moved them through three schools to avoid chaplains.

Williams is planning a High Court challenge to the federal government's financial support for the chaplaincy program on constitutional grounds. He has engaged Sydney barrister Bret Walker, SC.

It is a big ask, since the government did not introduce legislation for the chaplaincy program. But Williams's quixotic quest has attracted widespread attention. After the ABC program Compass looked into the chaplaincy program, Williams's High Court Challenge website plea for fighting funds attracted Paypal contributions from across Australia, the United States and Canada.

A couple living on the NSW north coast say they are scared to speak out against the chaplaincy program because their eight-year-old son has been attacked at school. They wish to remain anonymous, but say the local Christian lobby group that applied for and secured funding for a chaplain did so without the knowledge of the general parent body.

''Since then, we've had to comfort our son on more than one occasion when he's come home upset after being told by other pupils that he'll literally 'burn in hell' because he does not share their religious beliefs or attend the same church,'' the father says.

School chaplains have been around for six decades but it took the sunshine state to fund them. It occurred during Rudd's political apprenticeship under then Queensland premier Wayne Goss.

Fifteen years later, in June 2006, five federal Liberals - Julie Bishop, Greg Hunt, Andrew Laming, David Fawcett and Louise Markus - proposed a pilot chaplaincy program. But the then Queensland premier, Peter Beattie, stole a march on them the following month, announcing $3 million for P&C associations to employ chaplains.

The following October, Howard announced his $90 million National School Chaplaincy Program. It provided grants of $20,000 a year to schools to defray the cost of providing a chaplain. ''It is not an attempt to force-feed religion to our children,'' Howard said at the time, noting that the program was designed to provide assistance to students in need.

As prime minister, Rudd announced a further $42 million for the chaplaincy coffers last November. Then in August, Gillard raised the stakes big-time, promising $222 million.

Yet apart from Williams's mooted High Court case, few seem concerned about the program. Since its inception, there have been 23 complaints.

The only case to receive any publicity was in March last year when the Northern Territory Education Department temporarily suspended the chaplaincy program at six schools because a parent complained about proselytising.